This week's Book of the Week pick comes from photographer Mike Slack who has selected Yonder by Marnix Goossens published by Roma Publications.
"What is 'nature'? Why do people decorate their habitats with fake landscapes, flowers, palm trees, mountaintops? It's easy to be amused by domestic kitsch, but this recent work by Dutch photographer Marnix Goossens sidesteps irony in favor of thoughtful close-up compositions of shabby indoor spaces that reveal and conceal pieces of an idealized outdoor world. While the pictures are ostensibly about a human 'longing for freedom, independency, and nature,' they actually evoke a weird mix of confinement/calm, hope/decay. I don’t draw any conclusions from this work (except that maybe 'nature' isn’t really 'natural' at all — or, as Timothy Morton says, 'There is no journey into the wild but into the mind'), but after owning the book for six months I keep going back and seeing new details and nuances in the pictures, in part because the production has such an ambiguous, tactile intimacy — warm, rich ink shimmers on the surface of various paper stocks; behind the folded/double-sided dust jacket is an abstract photo screen-printed onto a raw cloth cover; a loose fictional text by the poet Maria Bernas (typeset sparesely onto thin pale green sheets, matching the endpapers), creates occasional 'rests' in the musical flow of the layout."—Mike Slack